Notes

Emily, describing Santa to the kiddo: “He’s one of the main Christmas guys.”

Perfect explanation, no additional details required.

On work Slack people shared two blog posts that are outside my normal wheelhouse but I found really interesting: The Inside Story of Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by Paul Lukas, and The Death of the Key Change by Chris Dalla Riva.

These are very different stories but I feel like they complement each other. They’re both stories of technology shaping artistic expression in ways that make perfect sense but would have been hard to predict.

I don’t know why these resonated with me so much this week, but I enjoyed them both!

We just finished rewatching the first season of People of Earth, and folks, that TV show was absolutely perfect in every way. Under-appreciated gem.

This is definitely one of those things I would have tweeted and gotten zero replies or likes. My timing and tastes are maybe not always calibrated to the moment.

I’m a few days late sharing this, but here are some results from the precinct where I was Election Coordinator on Tuesday:

We averaged one voter every two minutes, and actually kept a pretty consistent pace most of the day. It was the smoothest-running precinct I’ve ever worked.

That pace was good for about 32% turnout on Election Day. When you add early voting and vote by mail, our precinct had about 53% turnout — not the best in our ward, but above average.

While there were some minor hiccups, everything worked as expected. Everyone who came to our voting location intending to vote either voted or received instructions on where they needed to go instead.

I’m so grateful for the folks who volunteered to work with me for this election, and to everyone who came in to participate in our democracy.

The kiddo has been learning about lighthouses and libraries lately, and just referred to librarians as library-keepers.

… which will obviously be the correct term moving forward.

In reply to: @gerardkcohen on Twitter

Part of what made me finally give up on Twitter is this thread from Gerard K. Cohen.

I don’t know Gerard or any of the other former members of Twitter accessibility team. But I do know that they’ve done great work on a challenging platform and with a lot of eyes on them.

I don’t like the way Twitter functions to radicalize people. I don’t like the way it tolerates racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and transphobia. I don’t like that powerful people were permitted to use it to broadcast hate. I really don’t like that the new ownership seems eager to allow that kind of content.

But I also recognize that content moderation is hard to do at this scale, and people have different opinions. I can say “just ban all the Nazis” but I’m not the one who has to figure out how that works on a global policy level.

But eliminating the entire accessibility team is different.

Obviously one reason it hits hard is because this is my field, and it’s easy to see myself in the people who just lost their jobs.

But it’s also because eliminating that team is a statement about the new owner’s values. The whole point of a platform like Twitter is that anyone and everyone can log on and participate in uncountable conversations. With no accessibility team, you’re making a choice to exclude a lot of people from “anyone and everyone.”

Accessibility is about a baseline respect for the people you serve. For a company like Twitter, there’s no excuse that justifies not having an accessibility team. These are the kinds of core values that inform every other decision.

So that’s the last straw. Time to let go of Twitter, whose good mostly outweighed the bad for me. I don’t know what will replace it (or if anything should), but for now I’m here.

Hello world, I guess?

I’ve been trying to let go of Twitter for a while now, and the new ownership is making it really easy to just abandon it altogether. But I still like the idea of microblogging! Sometimes you just want to put words into the world that are quick, haven’t had a ton of thought, and are a little transient.